Through the translation looking glass: Differences in writing styles of male and female english language writers
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Date
2012
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Publisher
University of Management and Technology
Abstract
Literary studies refer to the male sentence and the female sentence, but the definition of
such sentences is highly subjective, and frequently untangible. This study uses a quantitative
approach to determine the differences between male and female sentences. Urdu translations of
four short stories written by female writers were compared with four other Urdu translations of
short stories written by male writers, by calculating the frequencies of masculine and feminine
nouns used to describe the male and female characters in each story. The stories were from ‘A
Selection of Short Stories and One Act Plays for BA students' by Prof. Salim Ahmad Siddiqi.
All eight writers were native English speakers. The nouns for each character were gathered by
selecting words used by the narrator to describe the character, words used by the character to
describe himself or herself, words other characters used to describe the character, and the names
of any objects the character interacted with in the story. These words were divided into two
groups, masculine and feminine, and the percentage of masculine and feminine nouns was
calculated. In order to determine any differences between male and female writers, the
percentage of masculine nouns allocated to male characters and the percentage of feminine
nouns allocated to female characters were separated and grouped according to whether they were
created by a male or female author. These figures where then represented as bar graphs.The
results of the study show that male writers tend to create male characters with higher levels of
masculine nouns and female characters with higher levels of feminine nouns. In contrast female writers have fewer characters with high frequencies of either masculine or feminine nouns.
Description
Supervised by Mr. Moazam Hashmi
Keywords
MS-Thesis, Semantic Principles, Linguistic Approaches